There are many occupations, sports, and hobbies that require specific safety measures in order to prevent injury. Many of these measures rely on increasing the visibility of a user or location. Specifically, brightly colored vests worn to increase a the visibility of a person are typically worn by many workers to enhance their safety. Police officers often wear safety vests when directing traffic or working an accident scene. These vests are often worn over their garments and are made in high-visibility colors such as neon orange, yellow, or green. To increase visibility, these vests often include reflective tape to reflect the light from car headlights when used at night. Likewise, similar safety vests are worn by Department of Transportation personnel and many other persons whose occupations require them to work in close proximity to highways and other areas of high vehicular traffic. Additionally, airport personnel use high-visibility safety vests when working on the ramp area around aircraft.
Another segment of society that often utilize high-visibility safety vests are people participating in sports such as hunting, fishing, cycling, and running. All of these sports rely on these vests to highlight the participant in order to protect them from being shot by other hunters or hit by vehicles whose drivers would not otherwise see them without a safety vest. Another benefit of using safety vests when participating in certain sports is to allow the wearers to be more closely tracked to prevent them or their companions from becoming lost. Hunters and fishermen often hunt and fish with others, but may become separated as they wander through the woods or downstream from one another. By wearing a brightly colored vest, the hunters or fishermen can better keep track of one another since the vests allow them to see each other from greater distances than they would otherwise be able to without the vests.
Even though these high-visibility safety vests greatly improve the chance that a wearer of the vest will be seen by others, certain limitations still exist. First, a brightly colored vest may be adequate for certain applications when used in a well-lit environment, but the ability for a colored vest to distinguish a wearer from the surrounding environment greatly diminishes as the ambient light also diminishes. As mentioned above, reflective tape is sometimes used to increase the visibility of a vest. This tape works well as long as the light source, i.e. headlights, is directed to the tape, but diminishes as the light source moves away from the reflective tape. This attribute of the reflective tape creates a hazard for workers in certain situations. For example, a person working at a location such as an intersection, where a vehicle might turn towards them only when it is already close to the worker, might not be seen until it is too late since the headlights of the vehicle will not shine in the direction of the worker until the vehicle turns in that direction. Additionally, most safety vests described above will not aid sportsmen in keeping within sight of one another once ambient light diminishes to the point that the vest can no longer be seen. Reflective tape does not help in this situation as the person wearing the vest may be too far away from a person with a light source such as a flashlight.
There are safety vests that have self-illumination features, such as vests made by POLYBRITE INTERNATIONAL of Naperville, Ill. These vests and others with illumination features only provide a user with a single safety feature, namely illumination, manufactured in a single configuration. A user may have the option of turning the illumination on and off, but is left with the particular configuration of reflective tape and illumination sources established by the manufacturer. Additionally, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are often left unprotected and susceptible to damage. Further, typical safety vests rely only on making the wearer more visible to the naked eye in order to make the wearer more perceptible and to enhance the safety of the wearer.
It is with respect that, these and other considerations that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.